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Firebird and Flash With Denève at the Symphony

April 19, 2012

Mardi Gras, Nubian arabesques, garden insects, enchantments. All were great
subjects for four evocative works of orchestral wizardry at Thursday
afternoon’s San Francisco Symphony concert, deftly conducted by Stéphane
Denève and superbly performed. But why are two of the four only repertoire
sideshows? The answer, in my book, is that they are doomed by uninspired melody.

Denève, who first conducted here three years ago, has been described as a
champion of French music. He has a knack for nuance and the wherewithal to
exploit the full dynamic range of the orchestra at his command, and he did
so at every turn to nice effect, with his James Levine-like mop of hair
bobbing authoritatively.

The program consisted of Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture,
Saint-Saëns’ Fifth piano concerto (Egyptian), Albert Roussel’s
symphonic fragments from The Spider’s Feast, and the 1919 version
of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. The first and last of these are
concert staples, whereas the others are played once or twice a year at most
in North America. All of these pieces have marvelous orchestral effects.
Berlioz has a cool tone cluster starting eight bars in that sounds every bit
like a trick the contemporary British composer Peter Maxwell Davies used to
characterize drinking a slug of whiskey down in his Orkney Wedding, and
Sunrise.

Saint-Saëns employs a startling trick of piano harmonics by
having octaves played quietly at the interval of a twelfth above the melody.
He wrote much of the work at Luxor during a winter vacation, and put a lot
of atmosphere, but not much else, in the music. Roussel depicts the entire
brief life of a mayfly in gossamer tones, capped by a mini-funeral march.
Stravinsky … well, you must already know he has an arsenal of sound
effects from his huge orchestra.

But the melodies in the Saint-Saëns and Roussel are as fleeting as that
mayfly. Only the first movement of the concerto has any decent ones, and
they’re not repeated enough. The concerto has some formidable technical
passages that impress audiences. Perhaps that’s why the featured soloist,
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, keeps the work in his repertoire. He did a terrific job
of execution, and provided a lovely rubato-rich encore, Frederic Mompou’s
Jeunes filles au jardin (Young girls in garden). But he’s one of
the few soloists who plays the piece. I wish he’d played the Fourth concerto
instead, which has melodies as good as Saint-Saëns’ famous Third symphony,
but that concerto is inexplicably played even more rarely than the Fifth.

Audience response was warmest for the concluding Stravinsky. Applause
dropped off so quickly after the Roussel that Denève was surprised by a
silent hall when he returned for his first curtain call. He had to wiggle
his hands through the stage doorway to fire up the crowd a bit before
returning.

All in all a pleasant, non-toxic afternoon, like alcohol-free champagne.

Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of the National Association of Composers, USA, a former president of Composers, Inc., and has served on the Board of New Music Bay Area.